Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Except for magnicidio plot claims, president Maduro’s
press conference yesterday was a compendium of most of the conspiracy theories proposed
by the Venezuelan government in the past years. The Empire was the main object of Maduro’s claims about destabilization
attempts against his government, which he called a state of “permanent
conspiracy.” But also local opposition leaders and other regional governments
were included in the plots.

The economic war
theory featured prominently. The United States was accused of promoting a “financial
and economic blockade” of the country. “Nobody has the right to try to impose
his policies with threats, pressures, sanctions, and economic, financial,
political, diplomatic, and much less military aggressions. Venezuela claims its
right to peace, independence, and self-determination,” said
Maduro. He added that even though 86% of Venezuelans rejected a US
intervention in the country, this possibility is supported by the opposition
leadership: “Only they back this threat, which they have sanctified, and they
have gone out of the country to ask for an economic and financial blockade
against Venezuela.”

International media
was also accused by Maduro of being part of this “permanent conspiracy.”
The BBC was particularly singled out by the president as the media outlet
behind what he called “an imperialist aggression of world-wide nature,” of
which the BBC has become “the biggest propaganda apparatus.” He added that “since
the war in Iraq, the BBC had not played such a disgusting [asqueroso] role.”

Most interesting of
yesterday’s conference was that Maduro provided a theory of three
interlinked coup plots backed by the United States against his government,
financed and coordinated via Miami and Bogotá, and enacted by local opposition
leaders:

“There is a permanent
conspiracy from Miami against Venezuela. All those captured after the attack against
the Paramacay fort have confessed,
and we know of their links and finances. Another group [of plotters] is related
to the old coupist military of 2002, which have fled the country. And another
group belongs to the incorrectly called Blue
Coup, even if most of them are in jail, they are still trying to make
noise. These three groups have been activated by them [United States] with a
lot of many, but the Venezuelan armed forces have developed very effective
anti-coup strategies.”

Despite the “evidence”
presented by Maduro of these coup plots, he also said he would be writing a
letter to US President Trump asking for conversations. “Trump and I have to
talk, because we don’t want our people to suffer, we have to co-exist in peace.
We are anti-imperialists and anti-colonialists, but we are not against the
United States, we love the people of the United States,” said Maduro.

(Read previous posts on
the Paramacay Fort incident here
and here, and on the Blue Coup here,
here,
and here.
Even though Maduro spoke against the term Blue
Coup, it was widely used by government officials and state media at the
time. The Agencia Venezolana de Noticias yesterday
ran a note explaining the links between the three coup plots under the title “Groups
managed from abroad have attacked the rule of law in Venezuela.”)

Saturday, August 12, 2017

“We have many options
for Venezuela, including a possible military option if necessary” said US President
Trump last night. “We have troops all over the world in places that are very
far away. Venezuela is not very far away and people are suffering and they’re
dying,” he added.

It’s unlikely that Trump’s
declarations will be followed by an imminent invasion of Venezuela, but they
are sure to boost the anti-imperialist and nationalist rhetoric of the Venezuelan
government. The declarations will be presented as part of a “coordinated” hemispheric
plan led by the US government, and backed by other “rightist” governments in
the region and the local opposition, to put an end to the Bolivarian revolution
and its “accomplishments”.

These are the first
reactions by several government officials to President Trump’s declarations:

Defense Minister Vladimir
Padrino López told Venezolana de
Televisión: “This is an act of craziness, and act of extremism. There is extremist
elite now governing the United States.”

Information and
Communication Minister Ernesto Villegas, has said that the Venezuelan Foreign
Minister will issue and official communique later today. He wrote on Twitter:

.@DrodriguezVen: We reject the cowardly, insolent, and vile threats from US President @realDonaldTrump against the sacred sovereignty of VenBoth Rodríguez and
Villegas re-twitted this response by Argentinian pro-chavista philosopher Fernando Buen Abad D.:

Thursday, August 10, 2017

On August 6, 1945, in
Hiroshima an atomic bomb killed at least 90,000 people, perhaps as many as
146,000. On August 6, 2017, an armed group of at least 18 attacked
the military fort of Paramacay in the Venezuelan city of Valencia. After a
gun battle that lasted for three hours, two of the attackers were dead and 10
had been detained, according to the government. The rest of the attacker fled
after stealing a cache of guns form the fort.

To even suggest a
comparison between these two events may seem tasteless to most. Not so to the Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias (AVN)
and its main conspiracy theorist-in-residence Hernán Mena Cifuentes (previous mentions
of him on this blog can be read here
and here.)

Mena Cifuentes’s
latest piece From
the Hiroshima Genocide to paramilitary terrorism in Paramacaysuggests
that “There are crimes against humanity, such as the ones perpetrated on August
6 in Hiroshima 72 years ago, and on August 6, 2017, in Paramacay Fort,
Valencia, that remain, not only in the collective memory of the people of the
countries where they were committed, but also in the whole world, the footprint
of the barbaric fascist terrorism on its grim march of violence, destruction
and death.”

“Prohibido Olvidar”
is the motto with which Mena Cifuentes closes his article.

Thursday, August 3, 2017

After Venezuela’s
electoral authority the Consejo Nacional
Electoral (CNE) announced
on June 31 that 8,089,320 people had voted on elections the previous day for
the new Constitutive Assembly, the opposition immediately cried foul. Participation
levels were important as the opposition refused to participate in the
elections. The opposition argued that the participation in the elections had
not reached 3 million. But the only evidence that the CNE had conspired with
the Executive to inflate the participation numbers were images
of empty voting centers, and previous polls
that showed that more that 80% of likely voters rejected a new Constitutive
Assembly.

Since yesterday the claims
by the opposition have suddenly received very strong support from Smartmatic,
the e-voting company that has provided technical support in 14 of the last elections
in Venezuela, including the June 30 Constitutive Assembly elections. Indeed,
Smartmatic was accused by sectors of the opposition in previous elections of
not revealing successive “elections frauds” in Venezuela. But now the company seems
willing to do just that.

In a statement
read in London by Smartmatic director Antonio Mugica, and first reported
by the BBC, the company said it could not vouch for the results provided by the
CNE: “Based on the robustness of our system, we know, without any doubt, that
the turn out of the recent election for a National Constituent Assembly was
manipulated. It is important to highlight that similar manipulations are made
in manual elections in many countries, but because of the lack of electronic
security and auditing safeguards, they go unnoticed.” Mugica also said
that there was discrepancy of “at least a million votes” between Smartmatic
data and what the CNE had reported.

Also yesterday Girish
Gupta, Reuters’ correspondent in Caracas, reported that
according to CNE internal data, only 3.7 million people had voted by 5:30. The
polls closed at 7:00 and political analyst Jennifer McCoy told Gupta: "Although
it's possible to have a late push at the end of the day, and the Socialist
Party has tried to do that in the past, to double the vote in the last hour and
a half would be without precedent."

And now it is of
course the government, and government media, hinting at Smartmatic being part
of a broad right-wing imperial conspiracy to discredit the election’s results.
The main
argument exposed by government media is that Smartmatic is contradicting
itself by claiming its systems are robust and that electoral results cannot be
changed. However Smartmatic claims that its systems are as robust as ever, but
that the CNE ignored the control and auditing safeguards this time around, and simply
reported a different result.

The head of the CNE,
Tibisay Lucena, gave a press
conference yesterday afternoon. She said that what has been said by
Smartmatic amounts to “an opinion by a company whose only role in the electoral
process is to provide services and technical support, which do not determine
the results. These declarations [by Smartmatic] have been made in the context
of a permanent aggression against the CNE.”

“It is not a private
company, located outside the country who guarantees the transparency and
credibility of Venezuela’s electoral system. Antonio Mugica says the differences
between what was announced and what the system provided were a million votes,
that is and irresponsible and groundless assertion,” added Lucena.

After Lucena’s press
conference, the Mayor of Caracas and top PSUV leader, Jorge Rodríguez, declared
that if it were not for “the violent acts of the fascist”, 10 million would
have turned out to vote in the elections. Asked by reporters if the PSUV would ask
for an audit of the process, he said that chavismo
would not “play the oppositions game.”

President Maduro has
announced that the newly elected Constitutive Assembly will be stablished
this Friday, in the nation’s Capitol, where the National Assembly meets. Maduro
called Smartmatic’s director Antonio Mugica “stupid” and said that “this
electoral process cannot be tainted by anything because it is transparent.”

Maduro also
hinted at possible future solution to Venezuela´s economic troubles: he
will summon the members of the Constitutive Assembly elected from the “business
sector” to Miraflores presidential palace, where they will meet with him every
day and advise him on economic decrees to defeat the “economic unconventional
war waged by sectors of the opposition.”

“I would like for you
(business sector representatives) to form a powerful economic commission that
will go to Miraflores every day to issue permanent economic decrees until we
recover that economy of the country,” explained the President.

Here is an image
published yesterday by Telesur explaining Smatmatic’s “contradictions”: